Boston Travel guide

Boston, a city with quite a lot of history on the east coast of the United states of america. Famous for lobster, his history, MIT and Harvard and Boston Marathon.
While Boston Marathon was just recently the target of an attack, the Marathon survived and the idea of using sports to bring people together. Boston is a very sporty city. While doing sightseeing or walking in one the parks you will see a lot of active people. The variety is from running, skating, cycling to rowing or sailing an the river.
During my time in Boston there were at least two 10 km running events in central Boston.
So defently a sport for sport minded people.

Boston freedom trail

The history of Boston is (for US) very long, back to 1630 and the Boston Tea-Party, everything can be discovered while walking the so called „freedom trail“ which marks a way crossing the city of Boston and reaches all the touristic spots. Helpful volunteers will answer every question in most of the destinations.

As I like to discover new cites with the so called Hop-On Hop-Off busses, Boston is a city to be discovered per pedes. All the parks in Boston are perfect to take a little nap while listening to people playing their instruments or just observe one of the squirrels.

Duck Tours Boston

When hitting Boston, you will notice strange looking vehicles, called Ducks. Durck Tours are the Boston way to discover the city and combine streets with water. I haven’t done the Duck tour, since I tried to walk as much as possible.

POI: 4 Copley Pl #4155, Boston, MA 02116, Vereinigte Staaten

For hungry people there is one particular street with dozen of different restaurants and bars, but do not hit them at rush hour, the top locations are way overcrowded, but even besides that, Boston has all kind of food, but should at least try lobster once, even if it is not that cheap.

POI: Hanover Street, Boston, MA, USA

Harvard Street

Being a nerd, Harvard and MIT were a must see on my list, so we went to Harvard via T, the subway in Boston, and explored the campus. It is very impressive and huge, even the area around the campus has „student-flair“. Beatiful buildings, students every were, but also a lot of tourists occupying the campus.

calculus sign

Completely opposite in my opinion is the MIT campus: no tourists, simple buildings, no students, no tourists, but a very nice setup on top of the highest Building. Nice side mark, on my way from T to MIT a girl went by smiling, it took 5 seconds until I found the „what was wrong with this girl“ – she was wearing google glasses – welcome to nerd heaven

MIT building

POI:
– Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 United states
– MIT Cambridge, MA USA

Thinks I planned
– Hit the nicest park in Boston: Boston Common (Boston Common Boston, MA 02108)
– Play soccer with friends
– Walk the freedom trail

Things I haven’t planned but turned out to be very nice:
– Whale watching (just go to: Boston Harbor Cruises 1 Long Wharf Boston, MA 02110)

Things I would do during my next stay in Boston:

– Visit the Boston Bombing monument
– Visit Boston Red sox stadium
– hit the „T“ on the right station and let it play music (Kendall Band in Kendall Station, Cambridge, Massachusetts)
– make a run in one of the parks
– eat lobster

Things I leaned:

– very European city
– whale watching will help to support whales (tours are used to do research on their behaviors
– there are actually rules for whale watching (how long to watch a whale…)
– bring your passport to Bars / Clubs —> they are not happy only having IDs, even when they are official („we have MIT students, they can copy nearly every ID within 30 minutes…)

Other nice spots:

Parish Cafe and Bar 361 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02116 – very good food (Sandwiches and Chicken Wings)
Minbar 51 Huntington Ave Boston, MA 02116 – nice
Storyville 90 Exeter St Boston, MA 02116 – good for clubbing

Disclaimer: This is not an travel guide, I just tried to write down my exp. during my time in Boston.

Recommended Book for Boston:

More Pics

Windows 7 Window outside of visible area

If you are running Windows 7, maybe with an external screen attached to your Notebook, you might find the problem that sometimes new Windows will be opened outside of the visible area.

To get the windows back, activate the window in Task bar, go with the mouse to the sub item of the window –> right klick -> move

Now the window is active and you can easily move it with arrows on your keyboard.

OSX Mavericks Wireshark x11

Wireshark OSX Maverick

Tried to use Wireshark, the one and only network protocol analizing tool on OSX Maverick?

It needs to have X11, which is not part of the basic operating system.

To download X11 / XQuartz:
Download it

Reboot after install

Start X11 Quartz:
Quartz in the program->Utilities Folder

Open Wireshark

Have a break (it will take quite some time the first time you start it)

Happy analyzing

Banana Pi a better raspberry pi

Since serveral month, many Pis are in use within my network. I am using them for XBMC Raspberry, Syslog Raspberry, Kippo Raspberry Pi, surveillence pi, Nagios Raspberry Pi, Backup Pi a TOR Raspberry pi and of course they are using UPS for power supply.

But since some of the use cases are not that trivial, the tech specs of the raspberry are not high enough. But now a new pi is on the road: Banana Pi.

Specs of the Banana Pi (bold most important ones):
SoC: Allwinner A20*
(ARM Cortex-A7 dual-core, 1GHz, Mali400MP2 GPU)
System Memory 1GB DDR3 DRAM
Storage: SD card slot, Extensible with SATA connection
Video output: HDMI, Composite, Extensible with on-board LVDS connector
Audio I/O: HDMI,3.5mm stereo jack output,On-board microphone input
Connectivity: Gigabit Ethernet
USB: 2* USB 2.0 ports, 1* OTG micro USB port,1* micro USB for power supply**
Expansion: Extensible 26-pin headers, Camera connector, Display connector for LVDS and touch screen
Misc: 3* on-board buttons, (Power, Reset, Uboot key), IR receiver
Dimensions: 92mm X 60 mm
Weight: 48 g

Wow! It has gigabit onboard, an faster CPU (with integrated GPU!) , double Sytem memory, is compatible to extension modules of the original Raspberry Pi.

Especially for multimedia use cases, like HD (1080p and even higher) streaming the Banana Pi looks quite nice. At the moment, XBMC is not fully compatible to the banana pi, but the bigger the fan group the faster XBMC will work on supporting the new toy.

I will try to get one of the boards to get a first impression and will write about it in the future.

A good review of Banana pi is available at: http://raspi.tv/2014/banana-pi-review-first-impressions. The author is describing some problems while installation, but I think that is a common problem for new products. One particular complaint is very interesting, he mentioned that the linux SD card image is bigger then needed, because they included free space to the image – what a pitty.

QNAP NAS: File System not clean. Examination failed (Cannot unmount disk)

If you receive the following error message from your QNAP NAS:

The file system is not clean. It is suggested that you run „check disk“

and a disk check is failed with that message:

[Mirror Disk Volume: Drive 2 3 4 1] Examination failed (Cannot unmount disk).

ssh your qnap and do the following:

/etc/init.d/services.sh stop && /etc/init.d/opentftp.sh stop && /etc/init.d/Qthttpd.sh stop
umount /dev/md0
e2fsck -f -v -C 0 /dev/md0
mount /dev/md0
reboot

If you receive the following error while trying to unmount the device:
umount: /share/MD0_DATA: device is busy

try to figure out which process is still using the device:

# lsof +f -- /dev/md0
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
sh 10721 admin cwd DIR 9,0 4096 16252936 /share/MD0_DATA/
lsof 29119 admin cwd DIR 9,0 4096 16252936 /share/MD0_DATA/
lsof 29120 admin cwd DIR 9,0 4096 16252936 /share/MD0_DATA/

Which indicates that your current shell is trying to use the device, simply use: cd / and umount again.

That should help

REMNux set time

REMNux, an awesome Unix distribution built by Lenny Zeltser for reverse engineering malware. It is build for out of the box reversing.

The documentation is almost complete, but one point I was missing while using it is quite important: correct time settings!
In order to check certain logs, contain evidence etc you want to have an accurate time setting on the system.

First: set the right timezone:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

The first shot then would be NTP by:
sudo ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com #or your prefered NTP server (maybe in your lab envirenment)

Because of the content running in the system, you might want to limit network access so NTP might not be available.
To set the date manually use:

sudo date $newdatetimestring
Format:
nnddhhmmyyyy.ss

To print this string on another unix system use the following command:
date "+%m%d%I%M%Y.%S"
040211422014.48

Copy this string and modify it according to the difference between copy paste process.
Check your correct date settings with:
date

Now happy reversing

Reference: Install REMNUX as virtual instance

Recovering Photos From Bad Storage Cards (with ddrescue)

Today, Jonathan Zdziarski wrote a Blog post about recovery of Photos on a corrupt SD card. In total, the article is very good, but I would prefer to use ddrescue instead of dd only.

Had good expieriences with ddrescue in the past while recover data from SD cards and HDDs as well.

Hope this helps